P erhaps nowhere in the Western world has the relationship
between church and state been more intimate and involved
during the past five hundred years than in Latin America. On
the one hand, the Roman Catholic Church has been one of the
major forces in shaping the cultures of the twenty Latin
American republics. On the other hand, during the colonial
period the Catholic Church experienced almost total absorption
by the crown, and since the days of colonial rule the Catholic
Church has been repeatedly subjected to waves of anticlericalism
throughout almost all of Latin America. Ironically, in both
instances -- during colonial rule and since independence -- the real
objective of the state in its relationship to the Catholic Church in Latin America has been much the same, namely the
subordination of the Church to the control of the state.

While one may describe with reasonable historical accuracy
the Portuguese and Spanish penetration of America in terms of a
partnership between church and state, the fusion of two powers,
spiritual and temporal, symbolized by the two-edged sword, the
partnership of the spheres of church and state was by no means
coordinate. Rather, the "partnership" was one in which the
Catholic Church was clearly a junior partner, subject to the will
of the monarchy. Nevertheless, as Catholic and non-Catholic
historians alike have noted, the union of church and state was
never, before or since, more completely actualized than in the
Portuguese and Spanish colonialism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Christian monarch during the period was invested with
all power and authority by virtue of his sacred, not secular,

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